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have'seen, he eventually carried off his Penrith bride, aged eighteen. 
Five baptismal registers are entered at Cockermouth, and then a 
very sad one at Penrith, as follows :— 
1778, March 11th—Mrs. Wordsworth, wife of John Wordsworth, 
Esq., of Cockermouth, aged 30. Buried. 
The poor lady had been on a visit to friends at London, who 
had honoured her with the use of the best bed, which being, as 
best beds often were, a damp one, sent her back to the north with 
the hand of death upon her to die at her father’s house in Penrith. 
Mrs. Wordsworth left four sons and one daughter—Richard ; 
William, the poet; Dorothy; John, captain in the E. I. Marine, 
who perished at sea; and Christopher, D.D., Master of Trinity 
College, Cambridge. The bereaved husband never recovered 
his loss, and five years and a few months afterwards died in 
consequence of exposure all night upon an open moor, having 
lost his way in the dark when on a professional journey. Much 
of William Wordsworth’s childhood was spent at his grandfather’s 
house at Penrith, where he received the first rudiments of his 
education, under a worthy old dame teacher, Mrs. Birkett, who 
had taught three generations of young Penrithians of the better 
class. Little William shared the smiles and frowns of the good 
old dame with little Mary Hutchinson, the daughter of Mr. John 
Hutchinson, a leading tradesman in Penrith, variously styled 
“tobacconist” and “merchant.” It looks like a case of child love 
with little William Wordsworth and Mary Hutchinson, destined to 
mature in after life into mutual attachment, for Mary eventually 
became the poet’s wife. 
Wordsworth himself, writing of his childhood’s days at Penrith, 
says: “The time of my infancy and early boyhood was passed 
partly at Cockermouth and partly with my mother’s parents at 
Penrith.” He tells of once going into the attics of his grandfather’s 
house upon some indignity having been put upon him, with the 
intention of destroying himself with one of the foils kept there, 
but, he adds, “I took the foil in hand, but my heart failed.” 
“Upon another occasion,” he says, “while I was at my grandfather’s 
